View PDF - Caleb Daniloff

TheArtof War
For centuries, strict rules of warfare
dictated how armies engaged on the
battlefield.
As proxy militias, suicide bombers,
and private contractors proliferate,
the rules are being rewritten—and
Kateri Carmola is attempting to
make sense of it all.
KATERI CARMOLA MOVES ACROSS THE
CARPET IN TWILIGHT HALL WITH
GRACE; she was a dancer once. The
dreams of her youth are still evident
in her smooth gait and the effortless
way she uses her hands when she
speaks—birds fluttering around the
words. In front of her sit 40 students,
eagerly scribbling notes.
There are no spare seats in this corner classroom. Her popular
War, Law, and Ethics course is usually overenrolled. In it, she
explores the laws and moral dilemmas of armed conflict—from
the ancient Greeks to the global war on terror.
These days, the development that most interests Carmola is
the explosion of private military firms in Iraq and how that trend
reflects a morally slippery shift in U.S. military strategy—the out-
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B Y C A L E B D A N I L O F F
P H O T O G R A P H S B Y B R I D G E T B E S A W G O R M A N
sourcing of missions, from combat to interrogation. In short, U.S.
foreign policy is being executed, in no small part, by a largely
unregulated private sector.
Carmola steps away from the chalkboard, her fingertips
smudged white. Today’s topic: the breakdown and restoration of
restraint in warfare.The sleeves on her black button-down blouse
are rolled to the elbow.White lines from road salt squiggle along
the toes of her leather boots.
An assistant professor of political science and a Christian A.
Johnson Fellow in Political Philosophy, Carmola has written articles
and helped organize national conferences about the topic of
outsourcing national security—including one on campus last
fall—and belongs to an electronic forum for security contractors
in Iraq. She’ll take next year off from the classroom to finish a
book on the subject.
“I want people to realize the cost of our foreign policies,” she
says later.“We tend to imagine these policies are costless, when, in
fact,they are just being borne by people who are out of our sight.”
Carmola is the faculty’s lone Vermont native, hailing from
St. Albans, an industrial town in the state’s northwest corner. She
exudes a no-nonsense, down-to-earth sensibility. In class, she
explains why it is important for students to own certain books
(Crimes of War:What the Public Should Know, Eichmann in Jerusalem:
A Report on the Banality of Evil), quipping that the price of one is
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equal to “just five Starbucks lattes.”Her students consider Carmola
firm, yet approachable, as curious about them as they are about
her.
Emily Berlanstein ’05, an English major from Baltimore,
Maryland, says: “This may sound unsophisticated, but Professor
Carmola is awesome. She’s someone who ignores textbooks
because it’s much more fun to discover the theories via first-hand
accounts. She’s energetic and has a real knack for connecting with
young people, without failing to remind them who’s boss. (I’ve
seen her throw chalk at a boy sleeping in the front row).”
Carmola’s lessons are also playing out on the battlefields of
Iraq. U.S. Marine Captain Michael
Hunzeker, 27, was a student of
Carmola’s when she taught at the
University of California, Berkeley,
before coming to Middlebury. He
took part in the ground invasion in
March 2003 and has trained hundreds
of Marines for battle.
“It’s easy to talk about a humane
war,” Captain Hunzeker says.
“Explaining it to a group of 18-yearold
Marines on the eve of an offensive
is a bit more difficult. Ms. Carmola
helped me deal with the toughest
question, one I heard over and over as
I attempted to explain the rules of engagement to every Marine—
‘Sir, why should we play by the rules when we know the enemy
won’t?’ She helped me understand the larger picture surrounding
the rules of war and gave me the tools to explain it in everyday
terms so that the people who make the difference—our young
warriors—could put it into action.”
Because this course is so grounded in the real world, fascinating
material arises daily.Aside from frequent bulletins on the war
on terror, there are regular developments in a rapidly morphing
U.S. military. In mid-February, the New York Times published several
articles—one on the immense popularity among civilians of
a military-devised video war game, another on the Pentagon’s
push to develop robots for possible combat operations.The latter
speaks to Carmola’s concern with moral equality on the battlefield.
“Quick thought: would you want to play sports with robots?”
she asks. Carmola posts these articles on the course Web site, and
recently added an instant-message exchange between one of her
students and a soldier friend now serving in Afghanistan. It touches
upon many of her research themes: the glorification of soldiers,
the dynamics of protesting war, military careerism, and excessive
contracting. (“The stories I have—,” the soldier writes, “You’ll
never want to pay taxes again.”) In short, the great appeal of
Carmola’s course is that it unfolds in real time.
IN HIGH SCHOOL, it was dance, not war that fired Carmola’s
mind.After graduating in the early 1980s, she left Vermont
to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She was an eager
teenager with a head full of city dreams. But life has a knack for
sticking its foot out.
“It’s a clash of ethos—
of the business culture
and military culture.
You never hear words
like ‘virtue’ and
‘honor’ in the business
world.”
Tisch freshmen were required to take a yearlong writing
course; Carmola’s was taught by a grad student and aspiring playwright.“He
came in and said,‘You’re all dancers, or you’re actors,
or Tisch School of the Arts students, so by my definition, you’re all
dumb,’” she recalls.“‘You’ve allowed your body to be the tool of
someone else’s mind, and I want you to reacquire your mind.’”
The instructor’s name was Tony Kushner, destined to become
one of America’s most influential playwrights. And his words
helped set the tone for Carmola’s intellectual life.“By the end of
that year with him, I was so taken with thinking about the world,”
she says.
Carmola gave up dance and transferred
to Columbia to pursue a degree
in Russian, but she says she wanted
even greater academic intensity and
left the following year for the
University of Chicago, an institution
known for devoting entire courses to a
single text. (“I felt I had years of education
to make up for,” she says.)
On campus,the intellectual energy
was palpable. Students protested not
investment in South Africa but the
slashing of library hours. One of
Carmola’s professors, a Holocaust survivor,
had taught himself Greek and
read Thucydides by candlelight in hidden crawl spaces. Carmola
felt she’d found a home.
In the summers, she returned to Vermont and worked “totally
non-intellectual jobs. It was the perfect balance,” she smiles.“I
needed to get away from the city and from books. On the farm,
we used to say you’d go beyond boredom.And there was kind of
a neat, trippy space beyond boredom.”
After graduating magna cum laude with a degree in tutorial
studies, she moved to New Mexico.Figuring law school was next,
she worked at a large law firm. In the evenings, she tutored at the
Santa Fe Indian School, supervising ninth-grade Pueblo and Hopi
students serving detention. It was here that her interest in warfare
began.To engage the boys, many of whom were the relatives of
Vietnam vets or interested in World War II Navajo code breakers,
she brought in books on war. The connection was immediate,
deep, and she still keeps in touch with some of those students.
Carmola grew tired of law work and taught at a private school
for a year, but her mind was still restless. She applied to Berkeley
to study the political role of women in Shakespeare but found
herself distracted by thoughts of war—the Gulf War and later the
paradoxical “humanitarian” wars—Somalia, Kosovo, Rwanda.
She stayed at Berkeley for 10years, earning a Ph.D. and giving
birth to two kids along the way. She went on to a postdoctoral
position at the university,focusing on military ethics,and was considering
a run for the local school board when an ad appeared for
a political philosophy position at Middlebury.Three months later,
she was on her way home. “When we landed it was manurespreading
time,” she laughs. “You could smell it at the airport. It
smelled like Vermont. I remember saying, ‘I feel like kissing the
ground.’Which is overinflated, but I felt that way.”
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KATERI CARMOLA SITS AT A TABLE at Amigos Cantina, a
Mexican eatery in downtown Middlebury. It’s a mild
February evening, and the restaurant fills up quickly—
groups of friends, local families with babies, an English professor
and his son. Carmola plucks a tortilla chip from a basket and starts
talking about some of the issues from her forthcoming book:
Global Warriors: Private Contractors and the Ambiguities of National
Strategy.
There are 20,000 private contractors currently on the
ground in Iraq, an unprecedented development, Carmola says.
They carry out missions once handled by the military—guarding
top U.S. officials, protecting oil pipelines, training Iraqi police, providing
food for prisoners. Some 200 have been killed, but none
make the official casualty count. It’s a $100-billion-a-year industry
that makes up a quarter of the U.S. defense budget. Regulation
is mild.The ethical implications have yet to catch up.“I think 10
years down the line, this will all be more easily understood,” she
says.“Now, it’s in this gray area.”
Private companies can ease an overstretched military, freeing
up more soldiers for battle, she says. But some critics see the contractors
as modern mercenaries motivated by salaries that run as
high as $15,000 a month.
Blurring matters is the fact that Pentagon contracts are often
awarded to U.S. firms that employ ex-military personnel from
various countries—South America, South Africa, the former
Soviet Union, Israel. Obviously, upholding the U.S. Constitution
is not in everyone’s professional DNA. So identifying the buck, let
alone figuring out where it stops, can become a puzzle.
“Contracting makes a lot of economic sense but it also has this
effect that the government can deny responsibility,” Carmola says,
cutting into a chicken enchilada. “There are so many chains, so
many links.”
Two private military firms have been implicated in the Abu
Ghraib torture scandal—CACI International Inc., of Arlington,
Virginia, and Titan Corporation, of San Diego, California. Several
of their civilian translators and interrogators are under investigation.
Carmola has recently returned from a security conference at
George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Aside from
regulation issues, panelists discussed tensions between the military
and private sector, from bidding wars over translators to fundamental
conflicts of interest. In many cases, both parties are serving
the U.S. government. She recalls one exchange between a military
official and a contractor.
“‘You proceed at 90 miles an hour in armored vehicles
through the streets of Baghdad,’ the officer said. ‘If you run over
anybody or draw incoming fire or piss off a bunch of Iraqis, you
don’t care because your mission is to keep your clients safe. Our
mission is doing appropriate counterinsurgency which is trying to
win the hearts and minds of these people.’”
Carmola takes a sip from her drink.“It’s a clash of ethos—of
the business culture and military culture, which are totally
opposed,” she says.“You never hear words like ‘virtue’ and ‘honor’
in the business world.”
Carmola believes that this new mix reflects the Pentagon’s
adjusted approach to warfare.While the September 11 terrorist
attacks and the war on terror have obviously influenced strategy,
the military had already been redefining itself. After Vietnam, the
military, as well as the public, developed what Carmola calls “casualty
phobia”—an aversion to soldier deaths and mutilations.
Fighting from the air (as in Kosovo, where not a single plane was
lost) became the norm. There was an increased use of Special
Forces (“the darlings of the Defense Department,” she says). And
the U.S. began to rely on indigenous outfits to help fight its battles,
like the oft-abusive Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. In an
article published last year in the International Journal of Politics and
Ethics, Carmola raised the provocative question of whether this
meant the U.S. was outsourcing war crimes, too.
“One of my early thoughts was, Is our regular military so
legally bound, so transparent, so professional that if you want all
this dirty warfare going on, you have to sort of do it in a parallel
universe, whether it’s special ops, CIA, or private contractors. Sort
of like the Colombian military, which has paramilitaries do its
dirty work. How much of that is really going on? It’s really hard
to come out and say that.
“There are a lot of decent, hard-working people in the security
business, but recent allegations make me wonder what kind of
restraints really work for this industry, particularly during this conflict.”
Mark Evans, a professor of politics and international relations
at the University of Wales Swansea, says Carmola is helping shape
an important moral discussion on the shifting nature of war, especially
as waged by the West. He anthologized one of her articles in
his 2004 book Ethical Theory in the Study of International Politics.
In the article, Carmola focuses on proxy forces, private security
firms, and the proportional use of force.“Her ideas have helped to
clarify—indeed, render very vivid—the issues at stake and have
made significant contributions to this ongoing and highly relevant
controversy,” Evans says.
“Kateri’s current research explores a very hot topic,” says
Allison Stanger, a professor of political science and the director of
Middlebury’s Rohatyn Center for International Relations.“I very
much look forward to reading the fruits of her upcoming research
year.”
And by the looks of it, Stanger won’t be alone. Publishers have
already expressed interest. Carmola doesn’t seem too fazed by the
attention. She compares herself to an anthropologist, simply trying
to uncover what makes people and organizations tick. Rather
than seeking to influence policy, she hopes her book will tell readers
something about being a citizen in today’s complicated world.
“I think it’s every academic’s dream to just find some kind
of puzzle out there and try and loosen it up, make it more understandable,
so that our decisions are more informed.”
After dinner, she asks the waitress to wrap the rest of her chips
and guacamole. A few minutes later, she steps outside and walks
across Main Street toward her station wagon, keeping time with
the forces shaping our world.
Caleb Daniloff is a freelance writer in Middlebury. He’s a commentator
for Vermont Public Radio and has written for the New York Times,
Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix, and Publishers Weekly.
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